MIT student from Goa, Andrea Colaco, develops touch-free phone technology

Andrea Colaco, a PhD student at MIT's Media Lab, is building the next breakthrough in mobile technology — and every cell phone maker is watching. The question on everyone's mind: what comes after the touchscreen? Colaco's answer is gesture recognition — interacting with your device through thin air.

Colaco co-founded and led 3dim, a six-person team of MIT engineers, which in May 2013 won the grand prize at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, taking home $100,000 for the Mobile Track. The team patented a 3D gesture-recognition technology that works on smartphones, tablets, and devices like Google Glass — letting users type, change songs, play games, and sift through apps with simple hand and finger movements, no screen-tapping required.

The breakthrough was making it work on battery-powered mobile devices. Gesture tech like the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect needed power-hungry specialized hardware; 3dim's approach uses a standard smartphone camera and needs only a few milliwatts of additional power — about one-seventh of what a phone camera normally uses — while delivering millimeter-precise sensing. (MIT News, Boston Magazine)

Colaco hails from Velim in South Goa. She holds a BE in Electrical and Electronics from BITS Pilani and earned her MS at MIT before starting her PhD in Media Arts and Sciences. With the prize money, she said 3dim would go "full steam ahead," developing the technology for smart-device manufacturers who had already expressed interest. (TechCircle)

We may never have to touch our cell phone screens again.